Isn't that a textbook example of the dangers of short term thinking? In any engineering field, it's irrational to think that the industry won't shift underneath you in a way that makes your 95% market share irrelevant. And when the market does shift, the incumbent that fired all its engineers will be easy pickings for the new breed of competitors.
It's not just a tech industry issue either. When the U.S. auto industry was ascendent, Japan had a reputation for poor quality products and South Korea wasn't even on the scene yet. Well, Japan kept improving the technology and with that the quality, and not only caught up but blew past Detroit and the automakers did not even see it coming. U.S. automakers have spent the last few decades investing in the improvements Japanese companies had the foresight to be investing in all along.
It's not "rational" for companies to mortgage their futures to goose profits in the near term. It might be "rational" for executives to do so, but not for corporations as a whole.
Yeah, this is what happened. I supported Quark users at the time, and everyone was just surprised and confused. In contemporary terms, it would be as if Zynga didn't ship Farmville for iOS 7 and everyone had to switch to something else. Maybe they made a weird bet that customers wouldn't adopt OSX, or migrate at a decades long WinXP-pace. Since Apple binds the OS to hardware, it happened in (only) about five years.
Running Quark 4 and 5 under Classic was ugly and problematic. When Quark 6 finally shipped it was so buggy that it couldn't be deployed. By the time Quark 7 arrived, most people had switched.
It's not just a tech industry issue either. When the U.S. auto industry was ascendent, Japan had a reputation for poor quality products and South Korea wasn't even on the scene yet. Well, Japan kept improving the technology and with that the quality, and not only caught up but blew past Detroit and the automakers did not even see it coming. U.S. automakers have spent the last few decades investing in the improvements Japanese companies had the foresight to be investing in all along.
It's not "rational" for companies to mortgage their futures to goose profits in the near term. It might be "rational" for executives to do so, but not for corporations as a whole.